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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#131

Post by personZ »

beagle3 wrote: post #126
personZ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung. How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now. Which is why Apple devices feat…

Apple stopped selling it on their website. I heard they've stopped producing it and what you see in stores now is the remaining stock - what's your source that they're still making it? Furthermore, the virgin mobile link you gave is for no contract - but locked phone. While it's not comparable to $200-with-a-2-year-contract, it is also not comparable to an unlocked phone.

Apple stopped selling it on their website.

Most competitive makes don't sell their devices on their website at all. That really doesn't demonstrate anything.

Not only does Apple still manufacture the 4S, they recently restarted production of the iPhone 4 (sans S) for the developing world. I would cite this, but you can find references everywhere and with ease, so that hardly seems necessary.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#132

Post by bztzt »

MichaelGG wrote: post #112
robotresearcher wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS has been trying with pen/touch for ages. They had a "Windows for Pen Computing" way back in the 3.1 days. It's not that they have not been trying. The WIMP desktop and app model just doesn't work well with touch. Apple wisely forked the interface because no one has been able to do a single interface that's any good.

MSR had a neat little thing that allowed some sort of "snap to UI element" functionality. That way, targeting a 16x16px thing like "close tab" wouldn't be so difficult. Or they could have some sort of gesture that lets me go into a high accuracy mode. Or really, anything at all to make it easy to deal with. But nope, your finger becomes the new cursor and that's that.

Win8 does implement fuzzy touch targeting (looking at the geometry of your entire finger contact region instead of a single point, and picking a best-match UI element) on the desktop. Office 2013 (desktop) also invested in a bunch of touch improvements. It hasn't been enough. (plus, they already tried this approach with touch on win7 and it didn't seem to be working - which, among other reasons, was why they changed tack for win8 in the first place.)

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#133

Post by brudgers »

Rapzid wrote: post #85

The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities. This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lea…

Microsoft's first open source project, Wix, is 10 years old.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiX

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#134

Post by jimbokun »

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

You may have stumbled upon a strategic product category: VB6 like development tools compiling to iOS Android and web, backed by Office, Azure and other Microsoft software and services. Has the potential to get businessesand developers back onto the Microsoft platforms.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#135

Post by jimbokun »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #79
melling wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits. http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler... http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/

As Microsoft surpassed Apple and of course Amiga to become the absolute necessity of practicality that they are today, I don't think they cared as much about what the "cool kids" wanted. I think it's apparent and I am thankful that Microsoft didn't copy Apple's UI and instead went with a much more practical and utilitarian approach than Apple. This along with Microsoft's business model obviously works better for the…

At the moment, the Apple business model is far out in front of the Microsoft business model, from a sheer profit perspective.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#136

Post by chj »

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I don't really miss vb6 as a language, but its IDE is so pleasant to use, no matter you're a beginner or a seasoned programmer.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#137

Post by anewcolor »

personZ wrote: post #131
beagle3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple stopped selling it on their website. I heard they've stopped producing it and what you see in stores now is the remaining stock - what's your source that they're still making it? Furthermore, the virgin mobile link you gave is for no contract - but locked phone. While it's not comparable to $200-with-a-2-year-contract, it is also not comparable to an unlocked phone.

Apple stopped selling it on their website. Most competitive makes don't sell their devices on their website at all. That really doesn't demonstrate anything. Not only does Apple still manufacture the 4S, they recently restarted production of the iPhone 4 (sans S) for the developing world. I would cite this, but you can find references everywhere and with ease, so that hardly seems necessary.

have a reference that isn't a rumor site?

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#138

Post by mwcampbell »

grokys wrote: post #25

> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new virtuous circle. And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF = Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only. For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things tha…

I've concluded that Windows Forms is the least bad of the official Microsoft GUI frameworks.

MFC is OK if you can accept its crufty old flavor of C++. But it wouldn't allow for much sharing of code between Windows desktop apps and modern (Metro) apps, whereas a .NET-based solution would let you share non-GUI code easily.

WPF was developed for a relatively short period of time, starting in the early 2000s, and then basically abandoned. Windows Forms may not be much older than WPF, and both are apparently now in maintenance mode, but Windows Forms has the advantage of being based on the Windows API and common controls, which have been developed since Windows 1.0 in 1985. WPF was all new technology; it used the older Windows APIs only as much as it had to. So Windows Forms is based on the tried and true foundation for Windows GUIs.

This is a bit fuzzy, but it seems to me that WPF reflects the rich-client excesses of its time. In the early to mid 2000s, Microsoft and Sun (with Java/Swing) were trying very hard to be better than web apps. For Microsoft with WPF, this meant building the whole framework on a very advanced graphics subsystem, the then-cutting-edge Direct3D 9. I dare say they didn't care much about running well on older or less capable hardware; they just wanted to take full advantage of what the latest hardware could offer. By contrast, the Windows GDI and USER subsystems were designed to run on primitive raster graphics hardware, so Windows Forms apps benefit from the relatively low system requirements.

Now I'd like to present a case study in how the excesses of WPF resulted in a less than satisfactory user experience for a niche application where WPF's advanced graphics capabilities were almost certainly unnecessary. My brother is a Christian minister. About three years ago at Christmas time, while he was still a seminary student, he told me about how his then-current laptop wasn't serving him well any more. Among other things, he mentioned that the Logos Bible study software he used wasn't running efficiently, and that for reasons unknown to him, Logos was unusually demanding when it comes to graphics hardware. This seemed anomalous at the time; a program like Logos is little more than a text viewer and editor. I didn't dig into that at the time, though; I just bought him a new laptop.

You can guess where this is going. Tonight, during my wandering about the Web, I happened to find out that starting with version 4, Logos was based on WPF. I made the connection with the conversation from three years ago, and confirmed that the excessive demands on graphics hardware were really an issue. See, for example, this forum thread from 2009:

http://community.logos.com/forums/t/6200.aspx

I feel bad for the users who had to take time out from their real work to post on a forum like this about technical minutiae like video card specs. At least one user justifiably questioned why a text-based research program like Logos would require a cutting-edge video card. We who develop end-user-facing software should take this as a lesson in how not to make our users happy, by prioritizing developer convenience and/or gratuitous use of cutting-edge technology over delivering a good user experience on the hardware that users actually have.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#139

Post by mistermann »

prewett wrote: post #129
mistermann wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers seem to as a matter of principle be vehemently opposed to the notion of cost / benefit being at least as important as "technical correctness" or whatever you want to call it. If its cheap, sustainable, and satisfies user requirements, that should be enough, should it not?

I see it as the same reason chefs don't like cutting carrots with table knives. It's a lot cheaper than a nice knife, and the carrots get all mushed up in the stew either way. But a nice knife is just a joy to use, and when you cut carrots all day, you want something that is a joy to use.

I don't disagree with a chef having a good knife to cut carrots, I disagree with a chef needing a new knife for every batch of carrots he cuts, especially when lesser chefs will have to come and tend to these carrots with special cuts (and you must understand these special cuts) 2, 3, 5 years down the road.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#140

Post by shmerl »

> Around three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

All of which are on quite shaky grounds with competition eating at them. MS know they can't keep these cash cows forever.

On the other hand, parasitic income that MS gets is just crazy huge: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-s...

And this attitude doesn't seem to change, despite some cosmetic shifts like more usage of open source.

Such kind of companies better fall into irrelevance sooner than later. We need real innovators, not humongous parasites.

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